Effective 20 Jun 10

BANNED
Rofellos as a General
Channel
Tolarian Academy
Staff of Domination

It’s clear that especially in the post-Eldrazi world, super-fast, super-reliable early mana production is dangerous to the format. Rofellos, Channel, and Tolarian Academy have all demonstrated they can do this with quite a bit of ease.

Unbanning Rofellos as a General was a year-long experiment that didn’t pan out. We had hoped it would lead to a spate of fun-and-full-of-fat decks, but that wasn’t the case. First- or second-turn Channel into Emrakul or similar things are simply negatively format-warping. Tolarian Academy, while not quite as explosive as the Rofellos and Channel, fuels easy early-game super-production of mana.

We’ve had our eyes on Staff of Domination for a long, long time, and were hoping that someone would find uses for it that didn’t include the term ‘degenerate.’ That hope proved fruitless. Strangely enough, it’s the first and cheapest activation that has proved the most troublesome.

The watchword of the Rule’s Committee’s vision of the format is ‘interactive.’ We’d like to foster an environment where ridiculous things happen, but that everyone playing has a chance to do them. Early, reliable, hyper-production of mana often leads to a single player playing by himself and others watching, and that’s not what we want for EDH.